Imagery

I've been writing about what makes a piece literary.  One important literary device is careful use of sensory imagery.  Imagery should be used to emphasize and elaborate on significant moments.  If you describe every little thing as your character walks down a hallway, your reader will be so tired of overwhelming amounts of detail that he or she won't be very interested in your story by the time you take them into the room with the actual murder victim and start describing that.  Say an author wants to make sure his reader doesn't miss a moment.  He figures the more description, the better readers will like it.  So he writes, "The shaggy, smelly, dark man with a slow, sluggish, tired trudge carried his large, heavy, leather-shod feet through a cluttered, long, cherry wood hallway and through the tall, brown, oversized door." He may not realize it's just too much.  I have read a book recently that was descriptive as to be what writers call "purple." The author described every moment of the entire book with such detail that very little happened.  I found it boring.  If an author occasionally writes a paragraph that is lavish with detail, it's okay if that scene is important.  It would be better if the author simply wrote description sparingly.  For instance, if that same author wrote the following, it would be much better.  "The shaggy man walked through a cluttered hallway to a wooden door."  The reader gets the idea without being so tired of detail that she's stopped reading.  

It's also possible to go too far the other way, to write in such a spare fashion so as to bore readers on the other end.  Such writing shows the bare facts of the events but does not transport or take the reader there.  Even spare literary authors like Ernest Hemingway use some description.  He said of his description, "I take great pains with my work, pruning and revising with a tireless hand. I have the welfare of my creations very much at heart. I cut them with infinite care, and burnish them until they become brilliant. What many another writer would be content to leave in massive proportions, I polish into a tiny gem." And that is the key to great, literary writing: balance.  You need description, but it should be carefully crafted and trimmed so as to be just enough but not too much.  Now go and impress the world with your careful detail.